I swallow my disappointment, and after Maya falls asleep that night I fervently start searching for alternative ways of getting to our destination. All flights with other airlines are already booked up, but there’s another way of getting there, one that my grandparents had always used—the night train. I’d initially opted against it to save time, but in light of the pilot strike, spending twenty-plus hours on a train seems like a bargain. The only seats available are in a car that allows pets, but at this point I don’t care, as long as we get there.
Maya is not particularly upset over this turn of events—quite the opposite. To her, riding the train is much more exotic than flying, and the sleeping component only adds to the adventure. Each room in the sleeping car features six berths, and my hopes that we’ll get one to ourselves are soon thwarted, as two female college students with big backpacks join us. Just before the train rolls out of the station, another young girl appears in the doorway. She’s wearing hiking clothes and keeps her bangs, some of which are a faded blue color, tied up in a casual knot.
“I hope you’re aware that pets are allowed here,” she says slightly apprehensively before she lets her travel companion enter our suite. “This is Sandor.” Sandor is an ocher-colored mix between a bull mastiff, a rottweiler, and a border collie, and he is approximately the size of a three-month-old calf. Nobody’s exactly doing cartwheels at the thought of sleeping with this beast, but with his lovable demeanor, Sandor soon wins us over. His equally amicable mistress, Filippa, is fifteen years old and traveling up north by herself to go backpacking with friends. Since there’s no Wi-Fi on the train and no screens to hide behind, everybody in the room actually talks to each other, and before too long Maya is teaching all three girls her favorite card game. “If I’d had Wi-Fi I would be on Snapchat right now,” Filippa says. “This is much better.”
The train takes us into ever more remote areas, eventually passing the Arctic Circle and chugging along northward. At two o’clock in the morning I wake up in my bottom bunk and immediately notice the soft light from the midnight sun filtering through the crack between the blackout curtain and the bottom of the window. Outside, an inaccessible world is passing by, pine tree by pine tree, bog by bog. If it hadn’t been for the farting, overly affectionate canine panting down my neck, the moment would have been nothing short of magical.
The next morning, we finally reach our destination, Björkliden, population twenty-nine—of which twenty are retired, the lady who runs the town’s only restaurant informs us. Aside from a group of Italian guest workers and a few older couples passing through in RVs, we seem to have the place to ourselves. The monumental silence is only broken a few times a day, when the heavy freight trains carrying precious iron ore from the mine in Kiruna roar through here on their way to a port on the Norwegian coast.
That night, we follow the characteristic cairns that mark the trails in the mountains and keep walking until we hit snow. Maya makes impromptu slides in some of the bigger snowfields. Even though it’s cloudy and the midnight sun is elusive, we have a panoramic view over the lake and the famous pipe-shaped canyon in the distance. It’s as if the scenery from my grandparents’ slide projector had suddenly jumped out and come to life.
“Are you going to leave Farmor Anne-Marie’s necklace here?” Maya asks as we reach another windswept peak and look out over a frothing stream that is crashing down from the mountains on our right.
“I don’t know. What do you think?”
“I think you should keep it. Then you can carry a piece of her with you all the time. If you leave the necklace here, Farmor Anne-Marie will be all by herself.”
“You know, that’s true. I didn’t think about that.”
The following day we hike for seven miles in drizzling rain and arrive in another little town, Abisko, where I have booked a private room at a hostel. Although this is a bigger town, with a grocery store, approximately one hundred permanent residents, and at least seventy-five sled dogs, it’s equally quiet. A sign on the hostel door notes that the reception is sometimes open, otherwise closed. Fortunately for us, we’re greeted by Hassan, a thirty-year-old dogsled driver who doubles as the hostel’s jack-of-all-trades. He shows us our room and the communal kitchen and bathroom and gives us a rundown of the procedures for the sauna, a staple in this part of the country.
“Just let me know if you have any questions,” Hassan says, and gets ready to leave.
“What about our room key?”
Hassan smiles and shakes his head.
“There is none.”
I stare at him, bewildered and pretty sure he’s joking. He’s not. However, he’s visibly amused.
“We don’t use keys here. Welcome to Lapland!”
Over the following three days, Maya and I get into a new rhythm—leaving for a hike in the morning, coming back for a nap in the afternoon, and then hiking some more in the late evening. We run into a sudden snowstorm on the top of a mountain and explore a camp built by the Sami, northern Scandinavia’s seminomadic indigenous population who traditionally make a living raising reindeer. Twice, Hassan lets us have a private meet-and-greet with the sled dogs, who are resting all summer.
On our last day, Maya wants to hike all the way to the Lapporten canyon, a distance of at least fifteen miles out and back. I suspect that this is probably a little more than she can chew, but we have a go at it anyway. On the way out, she makes elaborate plans for the tree house she wants to build in the woods behind our house when we get back to the US.
“We’ll need two bunk beds, one for me and Nora and one for when we have guests. And we need a TV and a kitchen to cook in, with white bags for trash and black bags for compost,” she says, and adds, “We need a toilet too.”
“Honey, this is starting to sound more like a fancy apartment than a tree house,” I interject.
“So can we have a toilet?”
“No!”
“How about a port-a-potty?”
“No! You can have a hole in the ground. How about that?”
“Okay, that’ll do.”
After hiking for about four miles through a thick birch forest, we reach a clearing where a herd of reindeer are lingering on their way to new grazing grounds. As we eat our lunch on a flat rock, they raise their velvet antlers and watch curiously from a distance, wary but not scared. For a while we just sit there and take it all in, the semi-wild animals, the snowcapped, gently rolling mountains, the rugged meadows, the tiny, hardy wildflowers. I pull out the silver necklace from underneath my windbreaker and run the little heart back and forth on the chain, as I’ve been doing so many times in the past couple of weeks. Then I decide that it’s time to let it go.
“This is for you,” I tell Maya, and put the chain around her neck. “Thanks for coming with me to Lapland. You would’ve made Farmor Anne-Marie proud.”
She fiddles with the silver heart and looks at me with an incredulous smile.
“Well, it’s a good thing I came with you, so that I could save the necklace,” she says assuredly.
“I know.”
She is still wearing the necklace two days later as we’re once again packing our bags, this time to fly back to the US.
My dad takes us to the airport in the old Saab, ironically while Jonas Blue’s cover of “Fast Car” is playing on the radio. He looks healthy. The hollow face from last summer has filled out, and lazy days by the sea have given him a robust tan. Nobody would guess, just by looking at him, that he’s just endured almost six months of preventive chemotherapy.
“See you on Skype” are his last words as we part ways and the girls and I head toward the security checkpoint.
We’re going home.
9 TIPS FOR HIKING WITH YOUNG CHILDREN (WITHOUT GOING TOTALLY NUTS)
Hiking is often the first outdoor activity that people attempt after becoming parents, and with good reason. It doesn’t require much equipment or planning, it’s easy to do with a baby on your back, and it can often be done close to home. But on
ce Baby has outgrown that carrier and you expect your young child to walk on his own, the situation changes. Although some kids are naturals and would gladly hike to the moon and back, others balk at the idea of walking more than a few hundred feet on their own. If your child belongs to the latter group, rest assured that there is hope. Start with these simple tips:
1. Don’t be in a hurry. If you expect to power walk your way around the trail and make it back within a set time frame, your hike will surely turn into a miserable debacle. With a toddler, it may take you three hours to walk a mile, or it may take half an hour. But probably three, so be prepared.
2. Start small. If your child doesn’t seem into the outdoorsy thing and you’re not into carrying him around anymore, try shorter hikes more often instead of one really long one. That way, you have a greater chance of success, and in case of a meltdown, you’re at least closer to the trailhead.
3. Dress for the weather. Clothing can make or break an outing. If your child has a different idea of what she should be wearing (and typically, it will be considerably less than what you think is appropriate), don’t fight it unless temperatures are dangerously low. Instead, bring extra clothes in a backpack so that you’re prepared when your child starts to complain about having cold hands.
4. Let your child be a leader. Kids and dogs love to be ahead of the pack, so let them. Leading gives kids a sense of responsibility and will make them grow with the task; older children often enjoy reading maps too. If you have more than one child, have them take turns to avoid sibling power struggles.
5. Find interesting things along the trail. Where you may enjoy the view and the accomplishment of making it to the next mile marker, chances are your child is more interested in looking at an ant colony or playing with the pretty leaves on the ground. Pay attention to what piques your child’s curiosity along the trail, and encourage it whenever you can.
6. Choose kid-friendly trails. Research in advance to find trails that have a lot of varying terrain that encourages adventure and imaginative play. Rock formations, ladders, fallen logs, bridges, and bodies of water are usually big hits with kids.
7. Bring a picnic (and emergency snacks). Food and the outdoors are like two peas in a pod. Stopping to eat breaks up the hike and gives everybody a chance to recharge their batteries. Reserve a special treat like hot chocolate to make hiking a special occasion in your child’s mind. And be sure to pack some emergency snacks—if you occasionally have to resort to bribery to get back to the trailhead, nobody will judge you.
8. Bring your furry friends. If you have dogs, this is the time for them to make themselves useful. A game of fetch or hide-and-seek with the dogs along the trail breaks up the walking for the kids, and the dogs love it too.
9. Find your crew. Hiking is much more fun—for kids and adults alike—when done with others. Groups like Hike It Baby get together to hike on a regular basis and have local chapters in many parts of the US. If there isn’t a group in your area, why not start one?
Scandinavian Parenting Tip #7
There’s no magic number of hours of screen time per day that works for everybody, so be sure to find the ideal level for your family. If you notice that electronic gadgets are stealing too much time from outdoor activities, active play with other children, or time spent doing things as a family, it’s probably time to cut back. Creating screen-free zones in your home or establishing screen-free times of the day, as well as being mindful of your own electronic media use, can help.
Suggested reading: Unplugged: 15 Steps to Disconnect from Technology and Reconnect with Nature, Yourself, Friends, and Family, by Jason Runkel Sperling. Kindle Edition, 2016.
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IT TAKES A VILLAGE
Nobody wants to be in the last generation that remembers when it was considered normal and expected for children to go outside and play. Nobody.
—RICHARD LOUV
It’s midnight by the time we set foot in Indiana, but the June heat and humidity are as in-your-face as ever. As my husband pulls the car into our driveway I see a familiar display: hundreds, maybe even thousands, of lightning bugs bobbing up and down in straight columns over the grass behind our house. It’s a recurring show I never get tired of watching.
Inside the house, it’s as if no time at all has passed. The same Christmas cards and magnetic poetry are on the fridge, along with fast-food coupons that Maya and Nora had earned through their respective reading programs at school. In the girls’ rooms, the rocks and shells that they had collected during various trips and vacations still sit in neat rows on their bookcases, along with a turtle shell, a raccoon skull, and a couple of jars full of shark teeth. Their stuffed animals are still arranged neatly on their beds.
Over the next couple of weeks, we gradually ease back into life in the US. For the girls, who are still on summer break, it’s more or less a seamless transition. Meanwhile, I once again find myself reflecting over the differences in our lifestyle here versus in Sweden.
After spending six months living there after nearly fifteen years away, I realized that in some ways Scandinavia faces many of the same challenges as the US. Following a worldwide trend, more and more children are growing up in cities, where they are farther removed from nature. (Although, ironically, my friends in central Stockholm have access to bigger public green spaces within a ten-minute walk from their apartment than I have within a thirty-minute drive of our house in rural Indiana.) The Scandinavian tradition of risky play is still strong by American standards, but it’s noticeably weaker than it was thirty years ago. Some schools no longer allow children to climb trees or have snowball fights, and due to regulations established by the European Union, safety surfaces around playground equipment are now a common sight. Simultaneously, a powerful trend known as “curling parenting,” which seeks to make a child’s life as smooth and free of adversity and emotional distress as possible, is competing with the tradition of fostering resilience. While young children still have a lot of time for unstructured play, the pressure is mounting on older children as some families almost seem to consider a busy schedule a fashion statement. Youth leaders are reporting that parents are putting more pressure on children in organized sports.
In education, a high PISA ranking has become somewhat of a holy grail in the Scandinavian countries, even though the test’s many critics point out that it fails to measure students’ creativity, imagination, and entrepreneurship, and is not a predictor of a country’s future economic success. Some critics fear that the ever-increasing focus on the PISA rankings could hurt Scandinavia’s educational tradition and lead to more high-stakes testing and, consequently, force educators to teach to the test. “Despite heavy skepticism from academics, PISA results have become a talisman, making headlines and sending low-scoring nations into a panic about falling standards,” writes Carl Honoré in Under Pressure: Rescuing Our Children from the Culture of Hyper-Parenting. In Denmark, he notes, “middling PISA scores have sparked fears that Danish schools place too much emphasis on the happiness of the pupils.” Sure enough, in 2014 Denmark enacted a sweeping school reform designed to raise the country’s PISA scores. The reform lengthened the school day and introduced mandatory “homework cafés” after school. Christine Antorini, Denmark’s education secretary, said that the reform was inspired by China and other top PISA performers in Asia.
But one of the biggest challenges to connecting children with nature in Scandinavia today is probably their tendency to connect with digital devices instead. “The tradition of friluftsliv is still an important part of Scandinavian culture, but regardless of whether you live in Stockholm, Kyoto, Berlin, or Beijing, the problem is the same—children stay inside and play computer games, and they move around less,” says Anders Szczepanski, director of the National Center for Outdoor Education at Linköping University.
In the US and in Scandinavia alike, it will take more than reminiscing over our own unplugged childhoods (cue images of drinking water straight out o
f the hose and building forts in the woods from sunup until sundown) to fix this one.
Rachel Carson, an American conservationist whose 1962 book Silent Spring inspired the start of the modern environmental movement, once wrote, “If a child is to keep alive his inborn sense of wonder, he needs the companionship of at least one adult who can share it, rediscovering with him the joy, excitement, and mystery of the world we live in.” I agree with Carson, except for one thing. I don’t think one adult is enough. If we want our children to fully engage in and draw the benefits from spending time in nature—and, just as importantly, if we think that them doing so is key to the future health of the planet—they need a village.
Scandinavia’s advantage is that there is already a robust village in place to foster and protect children’s connection with nature. I was lucky not only to have grown up right by a deep forest but also to be surrounded by people who all had their own way of connecting me with the natural world, whether they realized it or not. My dad, who would never call himself an outdoor enthusiast, taught me how to ski downhill and insisted on going camping every summer. My mom, who loved taking our dog for walks in the woods and always tinkered in her garden. My maternal grandparents, Mormor and Morfar, who had a small hobby farm where I would develop a lifelong love of rabbits and an equally deep fear of hissing geese. My paternal grandparents, Farmor and Farfar, who showed me that a simple cheese sandwich could taste like haute cuisine if only you ate it sitting on a blanket in the grass, listening to the bees humming in the distance. My community, where neighbors helped look out for each other’s kids when we explored the woods and the town on our own. And yes, my preschool and elementary school teachers who took us to the forest and made us go outside for recess every day—rain, sleet, snow, or shine.
There’s No Such Thing as Bad Weather Page 24